The part surfaced on openbenchmark.org, and if genuine, it means Intel has a workstation monster breathing down the neck of AMD’s flagship Threadripper 9995WX, which carries 96 Zen five cores.

Granite Rapids is already Intel’s most credible server architecture in years, matching AMD’s EPYC for core count parity after a long spell of lagging behind. Now the company appears to be bringing the same tiled approach down into the HEDT and workstation segment.

The chip looks like a higher-clocking variant of the Xeon 6787P, which has 86 cores but tops out at 3.8GHz.

If Intel sticks to two compute tiles, the 86-core SKU could be a cost-savvy way of pushing performance while dodging the expense of a three-die 128-core monster. Granite Rapids can scale higher, and it remains to be seen whether Chipzilla is holding back a true 128-core workstation flagship to go toe-to-toe with AMD’s top-end.

Workstation leaks earlier this year suggested Granite Rapids-W parts would support up to 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes, eight-channel DDR5, and hang off the W890 chipset. If true, that would bring Intel’s pro-grade offering back into the same weight class as AMD’s long-dominant WX chips, which have been ruling the roost since the Threadripper 3000 series brought 64 cores to the party.

The fact that Granite Rapids-WS clocks higher than its server siblings shows Intel knows brute force alone won’t do the job against Threadripper. AMD’s been flogging 96-core workstation parts for a while, while Intel’s best until now was the Sapphire Rapids Refresh W-3500 series, topping out at 60 cores. That gap left Chipzilla looking feeble in HEDT, even as it tried to put on a brave face in the data centre.

With Granite Rapids-WS, Intel finally has something that might make AMD sweat again in the workstation arena.